If you haven’t yet experienced the sublime joy of reviewing other peoples documents, you don’t know what you’re missing (and you should probably keep it that way). However, it’s pretty much unavoidable that in some point in your career you’ll have to do this. Once you go through this process a few times, you’ll realize that there are a few things that you keep seeing over and over again. No matter how many times you make a comment about it, these issues just won’t go away. With that in mind, I’ve listed two of the most common mistakes that I’ve come across below. Despite my best efforts, I see them in almost every document I review.

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One of the key pieces of any major document is the Table of Contents. Not only does it provide the audience with a way to navigate a document when you’re done with it, but it gives you a way to quickly move from section to section while creating it. Since it’s such a common element of many documents, you would think that most people would know how to create one quickly. However, this is not the case. That’s why I decided to put together this quick guide to creating one.

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Navigating through a large document can be very time consuming. Sure, you can use the Table of Contents when you’re at the beginning of the document, but what happens when you’re in the middle of the document? Going back to the beginning of the document to use the Table of Contents gets old fast, as does trying to scroll through the document to find the section you want to navigate to. This is where the Document Map View comes in handy.

The Document Map View is much like the Table of Contents. The difference is that it appears as a side bar to the left of the body of your document, so it is always there no matter where in your document you currently are. It will display links to all of the sections that have a standard, built-in heading style (i.e. Heading 1, 2, etc.). All you have to do is click on a link, and you will go to that heading.

For example, say I have the document below:

Here’s the breakdown:

• Section 1.0 is heading style Heading 1.
• Section 1.1 is heading style Heading 2.
• Section 2.0 is heading style Heading 1.

To access the Document Map View of this structure, I would perform the following steps:

1. Click on View.
2. Click on Document Map.

For the above example, this is would be the result:

The left hand pane is the Document Map View. To disable it, just repeat the above steps for enabling it.

This will save you a lot of time when navigating a document, and make reading/editing your documents much easier.